Luci Shaw takes stock of the personal, the poetic, and the sacred.
Luci Shaw has been writing poetry for more than half a century. She’s seen poetic fads, trends, and movements come and go. And she’s seen what endures. With that experience has come insight, an insight she distills into the 72 poems of her newest collection, An Incremental Life.
Shaw might be what I’d call “the poet of the quiet.” This isn’t the quietness of meekness or shyness. Hers is the quietness of the spirit, of experience lived and learned. This experience shines throughout the collection.
She begins by explaining (poetically) here title: “I live by increments, single / breaths of an ambient air, / marking off hours, days.” Life slows as understanding deepens; she edges each step “forward before venturing into the next.” This isn’t about living cautiously as it is living in recognition of the importance of each moment.
She organizes An Incremental Life into four parts, each containing about the same number of poems. “Increments” includes poems of personal experiences and places, from geography to the rather gruesome report of how her neuropathologist brother kept a human brain in a jar on his office shelf. “Elements” contains poems of flowers, birds, seasons, and other observations. “Testaments” is largely about poetry and its composition – how a poem begins, how it might suddenly happen while you’re cooking or eating, and the importance of even single words. And “Sacraments,” to no surprise, is about how Shaw sees the sacred in life, and she finds it in many unexpected places.
This poem is from the “Increments” section, and it’s a good example of how Shaw finds beauty and meaning in the most mundane of activities, like the donation of a cardigan.
Donation: Hand-Knit Cardigan
Here, take it, it is all I have to offer,
though it is unfinished, unfinishing,
doubtful that it will ever be finished.
My fingers clumsy with age and arthritis,
the knitted seams wait for joining, as if
the unfinished sleeve is its own end-of-
life destiny, its evidence of mortality’s
scourge. As old memory’s loosening skein
attempts to mend it, to sew the seams,
to pull together what remains of an old
skill, though the knitting itself remains
uneven, ragged, seams unsewn, yarn
faded, coffee-stained, the garment gaping
through its own sagging armholes.
A reject, though from behind the fabric
a scrape of light shines through, still.
Yes, Thank you. Thank you. That is all.
Luci Shaw
Shaw, a native of England, has lived in Canada, Australia, and the United States. Since 1988, she’s been writer-in-residence at Regents College in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has published 15 poetry collections and several nonfiction books, including three co-authored with Madeleine L’Engle. She has also edited three poetry anthologies and served as editor of Radix Magazine. She graduated with high honors from Wheaton College in Illinois.
I’ve been reading Shaw’s poetry for almost 15 years, since finding a copy of her 2010 collection Harvesting Fog in a small retreat center book shop in the Texas hill country. And I can’t reading any of her poetry now without thinking of that landscape – stark, spare, often shockingly beautiful, with a crystal blue river running through it like a flowing oasis. That’s Shaw’s poetry, and that’s the experience of reading An Incremental Life.
Related:
Luci Shaw and Reversing Entropy.
Photo by M’s photography, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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